


Stitches

by kindaquirky



Series: Exit Wounds [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Gen, Needlecrafting, Prompt Fill, Recovery, Sorry Not Sorry, everyone has a trigger, past is present for bucky, there will almost always be angst, working through issues one purl at a time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 11:07:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15884805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindaquirky/pseuds/kindaquirky
Summary: Bucky knew how to create, long before he knew how to destroy.An Avengers, Knit! prompt fill.





	Stitches

**Author's Note:**

> Shout-out to ANebulaDarkly for continually reading/editing my sad stories and always holding out hope I'll write something cheerful (lol don't hold your breath love).

It was the easy over-under of the needle Pepper was using that brought back the memories.  
Becca was suppose to be the one that learned to hem pants and darn socks, his father said. His mother was the one who would sit him right down next to his sister the moment his father left for work, hand him one of his old shirts, and say that there was nothing wrong with a self-sufficient man.  
Mrs. Rogers was the one who taught him how to take a needle and slide it through skin to help Steve heal faster from a fight. Of course, she had told him never to do it, to bring Steve directly to her. In Italy, neither of them could run home to their mothers to help clean up any holes they made.  
“Do you remember the time ugly Mike pushed you down so hard, your mom had to stitch up your calf?”  
Bucky didn’t mean to say it out loud in the common area. Pepper’s needle had stopped moving, her face closed off. His body had moved while he was locked in the memory, until he was only a few feet away from Pepper, the closest he had ever been to her. It took Bucky a moment to realize that he had been staring intently at the needle, and she was afraid of him.  
“Yeah. Ma did it right there on the kitchen table. Had that scar for years.” Until he was different, is left unsaid. Until they were both different, which will never really be said.  
“I think what’s really worrying,” Clint called out, breaking the silence that followed Steve’s comment, “Is that Mike was so ugly, you called him that to his face.”  
“Had to tell him and slightly less ugly Mike apart somehow,” Steve replied, and slowly turned Bucky away from Pepper, her needle, and the memories that come back whenever he hoped he might have a reprieve from them.

 

Darcy obviously had not been given the memo to not bring sharp objects near the terror machine, Bucky thinks another time, watching her knit haphazardly. Mrs. Rogers would have winced, and called out encouragement. His own mother would have snatched the needles away, restarted a row for her, and complained about wasting perfectly good yarn, all the while showing her how to properly hold the needles so she stopped purling.  
“Your tension is too tight,” Bucky mumbles, making Darcy look up at him in shock, and Thor turn his body to more easily protect her. Bucky left of his own free will this time, deciding the common room wasn’t for him.

 

Darcy had also not been given the memo stating that no one was to bother Bucky in his personal quarters. He knew this one existed, since Steve had left it out for him to see that Tony had given him a safe space in a place filled with nothing but people that feared him or made him fear himself. He heard her before she actually started knocking obnoxiously on his door, grunting as if carrying a large load. Bucky opened the door quickly, the continual knocking aggravating.  
“You're not suppose to bother the terrorist in his home,” Bucky said quietly, hoping to scare her off quickly.  
“I have helped destroy elves from another dimension, and seen an old, naked man run through Stonehenge. Your face would literally have to turn inside out to faze me,” Darcy said, shoving a large bag at him to take.  
“You've never seen pictures of Red Skull have you? That could happen to Steve or me anytime. Then what would you do?” Bucky huffed, moving from the doorway as she shoved her way in.  
“Call Sam so he could talk to you about accepting who you are now, and get you a great foundation. That’s all for you. A lot of it’s hand-me-downs, but if you hear Steve talk about it, you were lucky if anyone had anything to pass down, so I figured you wouldn’t care about previous ownership.”  
Bucky glanced at the oversized, brightly patterned reusable grocery bag Darcy was trying to shove at him, his hands still at his side, and saw all sorts of different needlecraft supplies.  
“Knitting?”  
“And crochet. And Pepper said you seemed interested in her embroidery project,” Darcy said, pointing at different objects in the tote as she spoke. She dropped the bag on his small round kitchen table when he refused to take the load out of her hands. She moved further into his apartment, taking in the bare walls, the basic furniture Tony had started him out with, which he never bothered to change.  
“Maybe I was just trying to scare her.”  
“She’s recovering from being able to make fireballs with her mind, and you think you scare her?” Darcy laughed slightly, flopping on his couch, rifling through the books on his coffee table.  
“You can take all this back,” Bucky growled, ripping the bag off the table and stalking over quickly to drop the bag at her feet. For all her bravado, he didn’t miss the way her shoulders tensed and she moved slightly back into the couch. She went to open her mouth for a retort, but Bucky quickly exited his own apartment, his safe house no longer the sanctuary he hoped it could be.  
When he returned hours later, Darcy was gone, her bright, conspicuous tote still sitting at the base of his beige couch.

 

While both the women of his life thought it best to teach him the necessities, Bucky couldn’t help but pick up on the crafts they took up in the little spare time they had, between caring for families and keeping homes afloat. His mother was quick and efficient when it came to fixing a tear in yet another shirt, but took her time when painstakingly embroidering a design on the hem of Becca's best church dress. If a few pennies could make her daughter feel beautiful, then it was worth the griping from their father, his mother always said. Winifred would pick apart old sweaters and re-knit them into thicker, beautifully patterned ones, or scarves to try and keep out what cold they could. Mrs. Rogers would knit intricate patterns, telling the both of them stories about how her grandmother had taught her fair isle when she was just a little girl in Ireland. The sweaters were just another way of showing people that Steve was different, another way for the both of them to get into fights with the Polish or Jewish boys. They never stopped wearing the sweaters, never stopped getting into fights. Bucky wasn’t the best with embroidery, but his mother had taught him how to follow a simple pattern when he was young; when his father wasn’t around. As he got older, he fell out of habit, work and women more interesting than tiny needles and intricate patterns.  
At the Rogers' household though, there was no father to worry about, no fear of being discovered doing women’s work. Sarah believed in everyone doing their part, and that included Steve having to mend his own pants, and help make his own sweaters. Here, Bucky would help Steve find matching colors, his eyesight never quite up for the task. Here, the excitement of women and the worries from work fell away to the cathartic clicking of the needles when Sarah would shove a skein of yarn at him, and tell him if he wanted new mittens so bad, just to make them.  
Memories of Steve being absolutely horrible at fair isle knit, yarn so knotted, not even his mother could fix it resurface. Memories of presenting his mother with the shaw he had knit her, their apartment always cold, and his mother wearing it every evening until it started to unravel from use. Becca had been absolutely horrid at embroidery, but was sewing her own dresses by the time she was fourteen. Winifred had taught Steve how to crochet a basic lace pattern, so Bucky nicked Becca's favorite dress, and had Steve add lace edging to the bottom for her, so she was always the prettiest girl in school. Winnifred had always embroidered Bucky's work shirts with his nickname, so no one at work could “accidentally” take one of his few shirts. Both families scrimping and saving to buy each other their preferred yarns, threads, extra needles, reworking old clothes or finding cheap yards of cloth to use for work shirts and every day dresses, but both families reaping the benefits of teaching each other new arts.  
The knitting needles bent in his metal hand. The tapestry needles would slide right out of his fingers, or worse, right into the gaps in the metal plating. The crochet hooks were too small, too worn, too much like failure. He left the bag in his living room, a burst of colors he did not want in his soothing, blank home.

 

Pepper had taken it upon herself to begin a crafting class in the Stark Tower, and had signed him up for the weekly emails. One week it was a dyeing class, another week it was the basics of spinning. It was supposed to be an outlet for the often overworked scientists of Stark Industries to unleash their creative side in productive ways, the emails said. Bucky figured this was code for 'create crafts not flesh eating viruses in your off time'. He hit unsubscribe every time, yet the mailing list always seemed to include him. Steve never went, saying he was worried about people paying closer attention to him than the teacher. Bucky agreed, and pretended that his reason was the same.  
Sometimes, Becca would have girlfriends over, and they would all sit around and chat as they made party dresses for each other, the Barnes house the only one with a sewing machine. It had been a wedding present from Winifred’s mother, and was an often coveted item by the neighbors. He could remember the sound of Becca at the machine, pressing the foot pedal down, putting the dresses together for her friends, because only family was allowed to touch the sewing machine. He and Steve would sit with them sometimes, girls they had known since they were all young, darning the clothes that always seemed to have a new hole in them. The girls would drawl about wanting a man that would share the household tasks like Steve and Bucky did. Becca would crack a joke at Bucky's expense, never looking up from the neat lines she created on the dresses, Steve always the one to get up and bring the light just a little closer to her workstation. Bucky always made sure the girls got home safe, and Steve would stay and help Becca clean up.  
The wooden needles he found in the bottom of the bag were odd, different than the old metal ones he had be taught with. They had a tendency to snap in his hand, and they did not make the soothing click-clack he associated with knitting, with Mrs. Rogers, his mother, and long nights making what they could not afford to buy.

 

He found the package outside his door after his usual morning routine of punishing his body to the point of exhaustion. It had his name on it, with Pepper's office as the sender. Trusting that if she really wanted something to happen to him, she would not put the entire tower at risk, he opened it as he walked inside his quiet, blank apartment. KnitOne, the box said. Easy use, the instructions told him. He placed the left needle in the holding block as it said to, and began try all over again. The process felt odd at first, his left hand twitching to try and take over the process of holding the needle and he slipped on his first row. But the row was completed, with no broken needles or broken hearts. Bucky flipped the needles, and began his second row. Then a third. Then a purl, and another.  
The scarf was completed by the time dinner rolled around. The tension was all wrong. The stitches sloppy in a way they hadn't been in decades, not since another lifetime ago. But as he folded it in the box the KnitOne came in, and placed it outside Pepper's office door, he thought of the bag full of unorganized yarns, hooks, and needles, and remembered when his mother would laugh as Bucky tried yet again to hold the too large needles in his too small hands. How she would make him sit on her rocking chair with her, hold his small hands in her hard-working ones, and teach him how to create, long before they taught him to destroy.  
Bucky went back to his, blank, boring apartment, and began to create again.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of a group prompt fill, with the two other creators taking their sweet time posting their own versions of what happens when you make avengers count stitches. You can bug at lest one of them [ANebulaDarkly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ANebulaDarkly/pseuds/ANebulaDarkly) to see if she'll ever post her novella length fic.


End file.
